


No Filter

by xbritomartx



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Cauldron, Feminist Praxis, Gen, Social Media, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29053758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xbritomartx/pseuds/xbritomartx
Summary: In every ointment, there is a fly. Sometimes it dresses like a penguin and thinks you're its friend.something something commentary on social media phonies kids these days something
Relationships: Jeanne Wynn | Citrine/Kurt Wynn | Number Man | Harbinger, Rebecca Costa-Brown | Alexandria/Fortuna | Contessa
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	No Filter

**Author's Note:**

> Did you ever wonder what the hell [this](https://i.imgur.com/ZbKaeWO.jpg) was all about?

The advent of the panuniversal feminist utopia was precipitated by the theft of a selfie stick.

Jeanne Wynn would not come to understand this until well after she found herself ruling a panuniversal feminist utopia, and the realization nearly made her depose herself out of spite.

Kurt had to talk her down.

"You can't abdicate simply because you don't like Fortuna's social media presence," he said. "Look at all that we've accomplished. Does it really matter how?"

"I _know_ that the end justifies the means," Jeanne retorted, "but—"

He kissed her fingers, then he kissed her everywhere else. 

📷

"Did you pay for that selfie stick?"

Contessa positioned herself in between Jeanne and Kurt and raised the stick in question. "Dumb question," she said, after checking the results.

Kurt frowned. "Based on our location, I assume you stole from the electronics accessories store three blocks over. An increase in neighborhood property crime rates of 0.0083 percent. This could have consequences."

"It won't," Contessa said.

Jeanne was forever unable to determine if her certainty was a lie or mere stupidity.

📷

"Get out!" Jeanne exclaimed, batting at Contessa with a broom taken from a stray chore-performing Harbinger.

"We can't kick her out," Kurt said. "She doesn't _want_ to be kicked out."

"She's in our bed, Kurt! In the middle!"

"I've taken to thinking of her as a cat," Kurt said, as Fortuna took another selfie that clearly caught the fact nobody in the room was wearing anything. 

"Well, I'm not a cat person," Jeanne shouted. "Get out!"

There was a long pause during which Contessa's three functional neurons came together to process this request.

"That wouldn't work," she said at last. "I am documenting my post-Cauldron life with my friends, and I can't do that if I'm not with my friends."

"We are _not_ y—"

Kurt made a violent shushing motion, but Contessa apparently hadn't noticed the attempted rejection. "And you would know this if you followed me on Paragram. Fortuna72."

"Four tuna?"

"The number of tuna is irrelevant, Kurt," Jeanne snapped, hurt that he wasn't supporting her defense of their bedroom. However confident she was that his reasons were good, she still thought they should discuss them privately once they had publicly presented a united front against the incursion.

"No. Eff oh are tee you en ay seven two." Her eyes were screwed shut and she spoke slowly. Jeanne suspected she was unfamiliar enough with the concept of letters that using them to spell out something as complex as her own name was proving to be burdensome.

"So there are _zero_ tuna," Kurt said, disapprovingly, like _that_ was the problem.

She threw his flannel pajama bottoms at him. "Put some pants on."

📷

Thankfully, Fortuna's Paragram was as popular as her friendships were real. She had only one follower, and each picture of Jeanne and Kurt blemished by Fortuna's makeupless, visibly middle-aged face had precisely one like and one comment.

Jeanne clicked on a photo at random—one of Fortuna's expressionless presence mostly blocking out Kurt zipping her up—to read the comment. 

"'I like your face,'" she quoted. 

Clicking on three other posts (which showed Kurt arranging berries around a crêpe he'd made for her, Kurt creating an operating system for her, and Kurt giving her a foot massage) yielded the same results.

_I like your face._

_I like your face._

_I like your face._

Jeanne thought about the implications of someone as powerful as Contessa being tailed by a cyberstalker emboldened enough to declare their obsession in public, then stopped herself by asking one simple question.

Was this her problem?

It was not.

(It was.)

📷

Jeanne adapted. She didn't want to, but she did; resistance, in the face of Fortuna preferring not to be resisted, was futile. As the weeks turned into months, she simply learned to ignore her omnipresence. There were more important things to focus on, like Kurt, achieving political supremacy, bending the surrounding world to her whim, and Kurt.

Naturally, the campaign concluded in her victory, and she settled comfortably into the seat of power. Crime rates and debt plummeted. GDP per capita and employment soared. Human and parahuman lived together in harmony, although parahuman and parahuman didn't always. If she could keep this up for the rest of her life, her name would go down as that of the greatest ruler in recorded history.

Occasionally her unwanted guest would disappear and come back with some trinket, like blackmail photos, the finger or eye or head of an opponent, or (three) tickets to a particularly choice concert on one of the less battered earths. Jeanne never could figure out what instigated these bouts of generosity—she didn't think Fortuna was sophisticated enough for boredom—but she could almost count them as rent. 

Until, that is, Fortuna dragged home something live.

"Aren't you supposed to be _dead_?"

An easy smile stretched Rebecca Costa-Brown's lips. She shrugged. This was more difficult than it should have been, as Fortuna had fastened herself to the newcomer's back in a hug that had (so far) lasted twenty-six minutes. "I'm moving in," she announced.

📷

Jeanne acted decisively; that is to say, she called a meeting.

"Remove her from the premises," she said. "And remove yourself, too."

"Why would I take her away from her best friends, who care about her just as much as she cares about them?" 

There was a dangerous undercurrent to Alexandria's words, and Jeanne hastily gulped her tea. It was too hot, probably because Kurt hadn't made it.

"Besides, her moving out might cause political problems for you," Alexandria continued. "Don't you follow her Paragram?"

"The only person who follows her Paragram is a cyberstalker who, I quote, 'likes her face.'"

This seemed to distract Alexandria. "Oh, the Custodian's still doing that?"

Jeanne blinked, unable to find a niche in her model of reality that could be filled by this particular piece of information. "Cauldron's janitor?"

"There was a reason I confiscated the mini sand garden she was using to talk to us."

Startled, Jeanne turned to see Doctor Mother standing by a Keurig that definitely hadn't been there half an hour ago.

"Don't look at me," she said. "Fortuna doesn't listen to me anymore."

She raised a mug of her own to her lips, took a long sip, swallowed, and made a ghastly face.

"Which is a pity. She's the only one who could get my coffee right."

Really, Jeanne thought, as she nursed her scalded tongue, it was a miracle that Kurt had turned out all right.

📷

"Kurt," Jeanne said. 

She said this a lot; her partner's name was her favorite syllable. Usually she said it with affection, respect, and occasionally (frequently) rapture.

At the moment, she sounded, well, curt.

"Yes, dear?"

"Explain this," she said, and she passed him her phone, which had a browser tab opened to paragram.com/fortuna72. "Explain how there are two hundred forty-eight million people who want to see dozens of identical selfies every week. Then explain why."

Kurt rubbed his perfect jaw as he scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. 

"I believe," he said at last, "that she discovered hashtags. Yes, here. Three months into her project, she tagged a post 'ootd.' This was her first tag and it remains her most frequently used."

Jeanne snorted. "She wears the same outfit every day. Are you telling me that hundreds of millions of people are following her _ironically_?"

She supposed it was possible, although it didn't shed any light on Alexandria's statement that removing Fortuna from her household would be a political problem.

"That ties into _why_ …" He passed the phone back over to her. "This was the first post she tagged #ootd."

Jeanne looked. Fortuna took up most of the picture, but she, Jeanne, was visibly sitting in a bubble bath, which was being drawn for her by a notably shirtless Kurt.

Sure enough, "I like your face" was the first comment, but it was followed by several dozen variations on "Isn't that the mayor?" and "Holy shit, that's the mayor" and "But who's the beefsteak?"

Realization dawned.

📷

If the Custodian was still leaving socially maladjusted and aesthetically deranged comments, they were buried among the five to fifteen thousand others that clogged every one of Fortuna's posts.

Jeanne squinted at the tags beneath some of the photos. "#whyPhoneonly."

"Fortuna uses a Cyborg," Kurt said. "She wouldn't ever touch a whyPhone."

It was true. Contessa was frightened of pineapples in every form, even the brand that produced the sleek white phones. They were too spiky.

"That doesn't stop her from using the tag disingenuously," Jeanne said. "Neither do Paragram's terms and conditions stop her from posting pictures of us."

There wasn't anything _particularly_ explicit. It was all very softcore at most, largely because Jeanne used her power liberally under such circumstances and all important locales were tastefully covered with a golden glow.

Nonetheless, these were not pictures that Jeanne would have shown to Accord, and that was the measure by which she gauged the appropriateness of her public appearances.

Kurt's thoughts were running along the same lines. "We could end this by reporting all of the more intimate pictures for violating the guideline about content that is unsafe for work," he said. "That could get her account suspended."

Fortuna opened the door and popped her head in. 

"No," she said.

She withdrew her head and shut the door.

📷

Alexandria's tone was patient, like she was telling a kindergartener that drinking directly from the rubber cement bottle was inappropriate. Jeanne suspected she used it on Fortuna a lot, which did nothing to decrease her resentment.

"Your relationship with Kurt is _why_ people follow Fortuna's Paragram," she was saying. "It makes you _popular_. It adds avenues of control, a dimension of soft power that would otherwise be beyond your reach. I don't see why you're complaining."

"What my husband and I do is nobody's business," Jeanne said. "It's _personal_ and belongs to him and me, not him and me and any nincompoop with an internet connection!"

"It is quite literally the business of every shopkeeper in Gimel," Alexandria countered. "Which you would know if you paid more attention to trends."

"I only wear classic, timeless looks," Jeanne said with a sniff. _Trends_ indeed.

"Not how I'd describe that shade of yellow," Alexandria said, because she was catty and jealous.

Fortuna burst in before Jeanne could share this analysis. "I have just hit two hundred fifty million followers," she announced.

Alexandria beamed. 

"I didn't use my power," Fortuna added, with a little smile that was half smug and half shy and wholly dopey. Jeanne wanted to slap it off her face, watch it splat against and slide down the wall to the floor, and then stamp upon it.

"I know. You should do something special to celebrate," Alexandria said, "like announce my return. That ought to get views up even higher."

Fortuna snapped her fingers. "Or I could do an unboxing! I just need to make someone get in a box!" 

She disappeared before Alexandria could reply.

"Combine the two," Jeanne suggested sourly. "Get in a coffin and wait until she remembers to take you back out."

📷

"Tell me why Alexandria thinks that our relationship is the business of every shopkeeper on Gimel. And no, I _cannot_ just ask her."

Kurt tightened his hold on her. "Why not?"

"I can't admit that I don't understand something." She thought about this, then quickly added: "It's not that I'm insecure, because I'm not. But if I were, I'd only show it to you."

(Technically, she was also baring her soul to Fortuna, which didn't count because Fortuna was not a person. However, she was an unperson who took a picture of the moment: Jeanne looked soulful, he looked utterly absorbed in her—as though he were hanging on every word she spoke, because he _was_.)

"I understand," he said, meaning it. "As it happens, I believe I know what economic and political trends Rebecca was referring to."

Something in his tone made her stomach fill with dread.

📷

Fortuna was entirely unrepentant, though Jeanne thought this might be because she simply didn't understand why this was so upsetting. Or that Jeanne was upset at all. Or what being upset even was.

It turned out that Fortuna had—unintentionally, probably (possibly), but thoroughly—turned her most intimate and personal relationship into every kind of commodity. The portrayal of their marriage and all its intimacies had formed the basis of a _fandom_. She was, in a word, _shipped_.

Well, _she_ really wasn't. She was just a prop, practically irrelevant. It was all about Kurt.

There were entire websites devoted to gossip, speculation, and careful analysis of Fortuna's selfies—and none of the analysis was centered on Fortuna. Whole fora were stuffed to the brim with catalogues of Kurt's minutest expressions, which were the only ones he had, his probable workout routine given the musculature that both his expert tailoring and Fortuna's more risque pictures revealed, and frankly desecratory speculation on his exact dimensions.

There were _listicles_ (which Alexandria claimed was a word) titled impertinent things like "Six Endearments the Mayor Probably Hears Everyday" and "Five Ways to Treat Your Lady Like A Mayor" and "Understated Class: Eight Ways the Mayor's Husband Demonstrates Real Manliness."

Worse, it had spilled out of the virtual world. Men were starting to wear khakis and button-downs—not so they could meet the dresscode of their workplaces, but so that they could attract internet-savvy women, who evidently all wanted their own Kurt. This was understandable, and entirely enraging.

She continued her scroll through the tidy roundup of economic and social trends that Kurt had thoughtfully provided. She occasionally had to pause to yell at Fortuna, who kept taking pictures of herself and Jeanne's ineffective remonstrations. 

Use of eye corrective surgery had plummeted; among those unlucky enough to have good vision, fake glasses were all the rage. Frames that looked like Kurt's were backordered up to six months. Pocket protectors had become a status symbol.

Jeanne finally got up and stormed over to Fortuna to demand an explanation. "I demand an explanation," she said, brandishing her whyPhone.

She didn't get one. The phone was a pineApple, and Fortuna knocked it out of her hands before fleeing.

📷

"It's quite simple, really. Thanks to Fortuna's Paragram, your husband is now the normative model of masculinity."

Jeanne considered deoxygenating the entire building, but by this point she wasn't sure that murdering Alexandria would stick, and she didn't want to sacrifice herself in vain. "Is that so," she said, not inflecting it like a question.

"It's quite simple," Alexandria said, repeating herself. It was due either to brain damage from being dead for two years, or from regularly having to converse with Fortuna. "In case you hadn't noticed, our species was recently put under a great deal of, ah, selection pressure."

Behind her, Fortuna walked into the glass door. She staggered back, then began to bat ineffectually at the knob.

" _I'm_ not the one you have to explain basic concepts to," Jeanne observed, letting her voice drip with contempt so acidic it ought to have dissolved her jaw.

"Those of us who survived—" 

"Which, how exactly did you."

"Face a completely different set of circumstances when it comes to choice of mate."

"And you picked the one who doesn't know that solid surfaces can be clear," Jeanne said.

"Well, not everyone can be as lucky as I am. Most people are interested in a relationship that reflects something permanent—something stable, dependable, and steady. They've latched on to him as representing _civilization_."

"She's afraid of pineapples," Jeanne said, bulldozing over the compliment being paid to Kurt. He was _hers_ and the fact she agreed with all of this did nothing to ameliorate her sense of outraged ownership. " _Pineapples_."

At the mention of the hated fruit, Fortuna abandoned her futile struggle with the door to cower behind Alexandria. Rather than tell Fortuna off for being an absurdity, she gave her a comforting hug and Citrine a reproving glower that clearly said _look at what you've done now_. 

"She ruined my phone! It had pictures of Kurt and me!"

"What a shame there is absolutely no other source of pictures of you and Kurt, then, isn't it?"

"Get out," Jeanne snarled, and—miracle of miracles—they did.

She barely even cared that Rebecca simply walked through the door without bothering to open it. 

📷

"That's it," Jeanne said. "I'm done. I'm going to stage a coup d'etat and overthrow myself and retire to a country with a non-extradition treaty and seven Swiss bank accounts."

"You don't need Switzerland's banking system when you have me," Kurt said, and he sounded a little wounded. 

She had to interrupt herself to kiss it better.

"You can't abdicate simply because you don't like Fortuna's way of handling things," he said. "Look at all that we've accomplished. Does it really matter how?"

"I _know_ that the end justifies the means," Jeanne retorted, "but—"

He kissed her fingers, then he kissed her everywhere else. 

Fortuna snapped a picture.


End file.
